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Prof sues Tech over free speech rights

Wetherbe says anti-tenure views led to retaliation

A Rawls College of Business professor sued Texas Tech on Tuesday, accusing Tech of passing him over for a deanship because of his anti-tenure views.

The suit, which James C. Wetherbe filed in U.S. District Court in Lubbock, also accuses Tech of withdrawing his name from nomination for a Horn Professorship — the highest honor the university bestows on faculty members — in retaliation for exercising his free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Texas Tech officials said Tuesday night they had not yet seen the suit, and therefore could not comment on it.

The suit leaves monetary damages to be determined by a jury, and also asks for judgments stating that Wetherbe is entitled to hold the rank of professor and has a valid appointment and contract, and that the university president forward Wetherbe’s Horn Professorship nomination to the Board of Regents.

In the 26-page suit, Wetherbe accuses Tech of engaging “in a campaign of innuendo and character assassination ... because of his openly-held views on tenure.”

The pleadings state that Wetherbe joined the Tech faculty as a full professor in 2000, and declined tenure with the university’s assent when he was hired.

The suit states that Wetherbe initially gave up tenure when he was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, and declined it when he moved to the University of Memphis.

“This was a personal, professional and principled decision,” the suit says, noting that while Wetherbe has personally declined to accept tenure, he participates in the process by providing external review letters and voting positively on qualified tenure cases.

The suit follows on a defamation suit Wetherbe filed earlier this year against Debra Laverie, senior associate dean at the Rawls College of Business.

That suit, pending before 99th District Judge William Sowder, alleges that Laverie made slanderous statements about Wetherbe to Tech Provost Bob Smith.

Those statements, according to both lawsuits, led Smith to drop Wetherbe, one of the search committee’s top four choices, from the list of nominees to replace retiring Rawls College Dean Allen McInnes this year, and to withdraw his Horn nomination from the regents’ consideration.

According to the federal suit, Smith made statements connected with both of those cases that Wetherbe’s lack of tenure disqualified him from both the deanship and the Horn professor honor.

The suit says that during a meeting to discuss the tenure issue, Smith told Wetherbe he believed Wetherbe’s original contract as a professor without tenure “was a mistake on the part of Texas Tech and must be corrected.”

The suit notes that the faculty committee that heard Wetherbe’s grievance on the Horn professorship unanimously recommended to then-President Guy Bailey that the nomination be submitted to the regents.

The grievance committee also recommended that Tech continue to honor Wetherbe’s contract.

Bailey did not re-nominate Wetherbe, and provided no explanation for that decision — an action that the suit says violates Tech policy.

In the nomination for the deanship, the suit says, Tech’s announcement of the vacancy not not list tenure as a requirement for the job.

“It is not unusual for deans of business schools to be untenured because business schools valuie the credentials and experience of business executives,” the suit contends. It adds that McInnes was one of three business executives hired as untenured deans at universities where Wetherbe has worked.